I really need to get some time to work on it some more, but that was exactly the idea I had a few years ago when I set up github repositories to track the US Code and Utah Code.

Of course, the only data I had easy access to was the codified law, some time after it was passed and went into effect, so my repos only track changes at that point. But, yes, what would be perfect is a distributed version control system that tracks the changes. Each legislator, each committee, each house would have its own fork, as would special interest groups, etc., even individual citizens with ideas about how to improve the law. Everyone could hack on their copies, push and pull changes, etc., all tracked by version history, and with official versions merging changes at point of adoption.

Imagine being able to run "annotate" on the law to find out where each bit of it came from! Of course, true sources would still often be obscured.

My next step, BTW (should I ever get time to hack on it), is to build a web UI that allows easy navigation of the code. I need to switch to pulling the XML version of the US Code from Cornell, then create some XSLT filters to hide some of the extraneous stuff and convert the links into a functional form and some stylesheets to present the code nicely, and finally create a web interface that allows the changes to be navigated and summarized.

+1.

If there were a concern about partisans being able to break in and alter the version being distributed, that would be legitimate -- but GPG signatures would address it. Outside of that... it has always been possible for people to create fake versions of documents and try to pass them off as the real thing, and yet this doesn't appear to have been an issue for pending legislation in the past.

That's what I want to know. If my iPhone is off or locked, other than being pistolwhipped into unlocking it, how safe is my data from those widgets the cops are starting to use for random device copying and snooping?

Assuming of course, auto-wipe is turned on and I used a complex passphrase for locking?

People always accuse doctors of having a God complex, and in many ways the low fat paradigm is the result of that.

Ancel Keys made some observations and weak correlations about dietary fat and cholesterol being related to heart disease in the mid 1960s. This was fertile ground for researchers and clinicians and many of them staked their careers on it and due to the fact that they could never quite get their studies to prove the relationship between heart disease and dietary fat & cholesterol (and still haven't!) they were able to string this out into an entire career.

Once you have careers and reputations on the line, you have a self-sustaining paradigm -- nobody wants to come out after 30 years of being dedicated to this idea to say "Gee, we were wrong all along." So they never promote research that questions their beliefs -- and that's probably putting it mildly, they actively attack and discount it.

Despite nearly 40 years of this advice, though, obesity is skyrocketing and the low fat paradigm is starting to crumble.

I think there's another unspoken element in this, and that's an American cultural predisposition to promote paradigms which are judgmental and involve denial of pleasure. Certainly by the mid 1960s, overall economic success had made meat an everyday staple for most Americans. It tasted good and made you feel good -- so a solution to heart disease and obesity was penance -- don't eat what you enjoy and what makes you feel good. And if you don't get thin on low-fat? Why you're not trying hard enough -- not enough exercise, not enough self well, it's a weakness of character problem!

Part of why they reacted so severely to Atkins was that he never preached that -- he said "Hey, eat as much of that steak as you like! Put a tab of butter on it! Eat until you're full, don't go hungry!" This was like religious blasphemy, not only did it contradict the fact of low-fat proponents, it contradicted the morality of their position.

At the end of the day, it's always about management decision making and resource allocation.

Starting with a lot of Congress being tried for Treason against the People OF the United states, those found guilty need to face a firing squad and have it televised on C-SPAN.

Problem is the sheep in this country keep voting for these scumbags that want to hide everything so they can try and get away with more.

Oh Yay, more bad Sci-Fi with Kevin Sorbo....

Why cant they let that whole show just die?

Yes Europe is connected together with a grid but right now power generated in Spain is not powering Germany or Poland.

Of course it is!

To transmit power that far requires a new DC grid.

No it does not, howver it would be better suited.

Seem we are talking past each other.
Or I made myself not clear: we alreay have a system built from small comunal grids.

A big deal of wind and solar power is fed directly (that means decentralized) into the local grids. Perhaps we are not agreeing on what the terms stable and fluctuations mean?

We don't have big solar plants, we have thousands of small plants! Perhaps we have 2 or 3 bigger ones in the MW range. Wind is more or less the same. Big wind farms we have perhaps 2 or 3 and 1 or 2 more under construction. The rest are roughly 1000 small plants consisting of 5 to 15 wind mills.

When you connect enough unstable communal grids together you get more instability not less.

Why should there be instability at all? The "disturbing" or destabilizing effects are very local, on the level of a communal grid. Should I have made explicitely clear that those effects are countered by grid operators? Bottom line there is no fluctuation/destabilization. For every surplus watt comming from the sun or wind the grid operators pump water uphill. For every down shift in solar production water is going downhill. Grid regulations happen more or less instantly, except super sensible equipment no one notices anything.
Ten, fivteen years ago, grid operation was done on a more central level. Now with decentralizations regulation means are also decentralized.

I am not saying that it is impossible but that movement too quickly will cause power problems.

The movement will always be in the right speed. It is not like that you simply can connect a plant to the grid and thats it.

Is the risks of high capitol costs, ...

Look from the perspective of a promotional program for our industries, it secures a lot of jobs over the next 2 or 3 decades.

I'm suspecting you could power a major metripolitan area with that spin...